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Hebrew Shlomo son and successor of David and traditionally regarded as the greatest king of Israel. He maintained his dominions with military strength and established Israelite colonies outside his kingdom's borders. The crowning achievement of his vast building program was the famous temple at his capital, Jerusalem.

Background.

Nearly all that is factually known of Solomon comes from the Bible (especially 1 Kings 1–11 and 2 Chronicles 1–9). While the latter already contains some legendary material, it is, in the main, a wealth of historical facts of the most prosaic and reliable nature.

Solomon's background is both well known and colourful. His father, David, was a self-made king, who, against great odds, founded the Judaean dynasty and carved out an empire from the border of Egypt to the Euphrates River. His first and greatest enemies were the Philistines, who controlled Palestine and kept the Tyrians and Sidonians from prospering on the sea. By training the Israelite infantry, especially the bowmen, he proved more than a match for Philistine and other foes who employed horses and chariots. In addition, David made common cause with King Hiram of Tyre, forming a land and sea alliance that endured into Solomon's reign. Solomon, accordingly, inherited a considerable empire, along with a Phoenician ally of prime importance for naval and merchant-marine operations.

Solomon's mother was Bathsheba, formerly the wife of David's Hittite general, Uriah. She proved to be adept at court intrigue. David seems to have been senile toward the close of his reign, and one of his wives, Haggith, tried to execute a plot in which her son, Adonijah, would be appointed as David's successor. Adonijah enlisted the aid of powerful allies: David's senior general, Joab, Abiathar the priest, and several other court figures. It was only through the efforts of Bathsheba, in concert with the prophet Nathan, that Solomon, who was younger than several of his brothers, was anointed king while David was still alive.

Empire builder.

As soon as he acceded to the throne, Solomon consolidated his position by liquidating his opponents ruthlessly, one by one. Once rid of his foes, he established his friends in the key posts of the military, governmental, and religious institutions. In an ancient Middle Eastern empire, this was almost the only means of establishing stable government.

Solomon also strengthened his position through marital alliances. Although the astonishing harem of Solomon—700 wives and 300 concubines—recorded in 1 Kings is no doubt an exaggeration of popular tradition, the figures do indicate his position as a grand monarch. Such a ménage brought prestige as well as pleasure, and the marriages were a form of diplomacy. He wed the sisters and daughters of kings from far and wide, cementing alliances of arms and trade to facilitate his establishment of a huge commercial empire. One of his brides was the daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh; the pharaoh captured and burned down the Canaanite city of Gezer and gave it to his son-in-law Solomon.

Like all empire builders, Solomon maintained his dominions with military strength. In addition to infantry, he had at his disposal impressive chariotry and cavalry. 2 Chronicles 8 recounts Solomon's successful military operations in Syria, where his targets included Tadmor-Palmyra, a caravan oasis city in the desert, midway between Syria and Mesopotamia. His aim was the control of a great overland trading route. To consolidate his interests in the province, he planted Israelite colonies to look after military, administrative, and commercial matters. Such colonies, often including cities in which chariots and provisions were kept, were in the long tradition of combining mercantile and military personnel to take care of their sovereign's trading interests far from home. Megiddo, a town located at the pass through the Carmel range connecting the coastal plain with the Plain of Esdraelon, is the best-preserved example of one of Solomon's cities. The remains of stalls for 450 horses discovered in Megiddo show that the figures of 1,400 chariots and 12,000 horses given for Solomon's forces in 1 Kings are scarcely exaggerated. (Some scholars question whether these are horse stalls or shop stalls.) The network of Solomon's far-flung trading posts eventually formed the nucleus of the first great Jewish Diaspora.

Palestine was destined to be an important centre because of its strategic location for trade by land and sea. By land, it alone connects Asia and Africa, and, along with Egypt, it is the only area with ports on the Atlantic-Mediterranean and Red Sea–Indian Ocean waterways. It was Solomon who fulfilled the commercial destiny of Palestine and brought it to its greatest heights. The nature of his empire was predominantly commercial—it served him and friendly rulers to increase trade by land and sea. The Phoenician king Hiram of Tyre, for example, needed the port of Ezion-geber, near Elath on the Gulf of Aqaba, which leads into the Red Sea and thence into the Indian Ocean. The joint merchant-marine expeditions of Hiram and Solomon sailed practically to the ends of the known world.

A celebrated episode in the reign of Solomon is the visit of the Queen of Sheba. Her southern Arabian kingdom lay along the Red Sea route into the Indian Ocean, and her terrain was rich in gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Solomon needed her products and her trade routes for maintaining his commercial network; she needed Solomon's cooperation for marketing her goods in the Mediterranean via his Palestinian ports. Legend makes much of a romance between the Queen of Sheba and Solomon, for his granting her “all that she desired, whatever she asked” (1 Kings 10:13) has been interpreted to include an offspring.

Solomon's Temple.

The demand for fortresses and garrison cities throughout his homeland and empire made it necessary for Solomon to embark on a vast building program; the prosperity of the nation made such a program possible. He was especially lavish with his capital, Jerusalem, where he erected a city wall, a construction called the Millo, the royal palace, and the famous Temple. Around Jerusalem (but not in the Holy City itself), he built facilities, including shrines, for the main groups of foreigners on trading missions in Israel. Later generations, in less secure and less prosperous times, destroyed those shrines around Jerusalem in a parochial spirit that could not accommodate itself to Solomon's ecumenical outlook. Solomon's Temple was to assume an importance far beyond what its dimensions might suggest, for its site became the only central shrine for Judaism and early Christianity.

The vigour of Solomon's building program made it oppressive. For example, men had to put in one month out of every three in forced labour. In theory, such labour was to be performed by the Canaanites—not by the noble Hebrew tribesmen, who were supposed to be the administrators, priests, and fighters. But Solomon's demands were such that there were not enough Canaanites to go around, so that Israelites were forced to do menial labour for the crown.

Solomon was a vigorous administrator, and he realized that the old division of the nation into 12 tribes posed a threat to the unity of the realm because the tribal feeling that was retained was not for the good of the state. Accordingly, he redivided the realm into 12 administrative districts, deviating, for the most part, from the tribal boundaries. The figure of 12 was retained because each district was to “support the palace” (i.e., shoulder federal obligations) for one of the 12 months in the year. Each district had its royally appointed governor, and a chief ruled over the 12 governors. Another important but unpopular appointee of the king was the chief of taxation; taxes were exacted most commonly in the form of forced labour and in kind.

His legendary wisdom.

Solomon also became famous as a sage. When two harlots each claimed to be the mother of the same baby, he determined the real mother by observing each woman's reaction to the prospect of dividing the child into two halves. Solomon was deemed wiser than all the sages of Egypt and the Middle East—even wiser than some ancient paragons of wisdom. The biblical Book of Proverbs contains collections of aphorisms and other wise teachings attributed to him. Solomon was also famed as a poet who composed 1,005 songs. The biblical Song of Solomon is (spuriously) attributed to him in the opening verse. His reputation as a great lover, reflected in the size of his harem, is appropriately a major theme in the Song of Solomon. Post-biblical tradition attributed later works to him: the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, on the one hand, and the Odes of Solomon and Psalms of Solomon, on the other, are tributes to him as sage and poet.